My Life

Davvonae Brown

October 9, 2013

Conditioning and Learning

Professor Murray

Reading Assignment 1

The article Pavlovian Conditioned Inhibition by Robert Rescorla discusses the notion of conditioned inhibition as it is defined as the “learned ability of a stimulus to control a response tendency opposed to excitation”. In this article Rescorla reintroduces Pavlov’s theory of Classical Conditioning, with hopes to come to a better understanding of the logical and empirical procedures that classify as Pavlov’s conditioned inhibition. He states that his article has three main objectives. The first one is to redefine the concept of conditioned inhibition to gain more clarity. The second one is to inspect the procedures available for identifying a stimulus as a Pavlovian conditioned inhibitor. The last objective of Rescorla’s article is to evaluation the scanty evidence on the conditions necessary in order to establish a stimulus as a conditioned inhibitor. After explaining the purpose of his paper, Rescorla goes on to compare and contrast the different amount of clarity in the terms conditioned response and conditioned inhibition. He believes that the definition of conditioned response is much clearer than the definition for conditioned inhibition.

This article later introduces two techniques that are useful to measure the inhibition of a stimulus. The first technique, known as the summation, is a procedure in which an inhibitor reduces the response that would normally be elicited by another stimulus. The second technique, known as the retardation-of-acquisition, is a procedure in which an inhibitor is retarded in the acquisition of an excitatory conditioned response. While most examples of this measurement is used for unconditioned stimulus, Rescorla explains how there are several possible operations for producing conditioned inhibitions.